An Explanation for the iOS 6 Jailbreak Tool Delay

The upcoming iOS 6/6.1 jailbreak tool has been a long time in the making and within the last few weeks things have amped up again in the blogosphere as the final release draws near. For the team of hardworking minds behind the tool this has undoubtedly been a painstaking process to ensure the final product can be used by tech savvy and novices alike without any major issue. Waiting for the polished finished product doesn’t seem like a bad price to pay. Personally, I’d rather use a jailbreak that I know has been thoroughly tested and doesn’t leave my device a useless brick. But alas, some people still can’t understand the wait. As one user demonstrated this in a Reddit forum comment stating “who cares about a stupid gooey”. In a rather candid response, planetbeingwhose real name is Yiduo David Wang, and is one of the “core” iPhone Dev Team members had this to say in his thoughtful reply:

For the record, it’s not just the GUI. I know seeing that that’s what we’re working on feels like a spit in the eye of people who are technically adept, but we have our reasons. There are a lot of things having to do with even getting the program built on all operating systems, making sure it can work on a wide range of versions of OS X and Windows (they all have their own different sets of library), and packaging it so it’s as dummy-proof as possible.

For example, how would you handle the problem of how to include Cydia? Would you include it as a separate file? If so, how would you handle people who don’t extract the whole zip file (happens every single release) and just try to run the executable by itself? Another example: How would you handle temporary files? Just write them to the current directory? Some versions of Windows really don’t like that. You have to figure out a portable way to find a temporary directory you can write to.

At any rate, I’m sure if we released what we had, a certain percentage of the population will be able to figure out the exact right conditions they have to have in order to make the jailbreak work. The rest of the vast majority of people will be angry, frustrated and possibly have lost data, purchased music, etc. (since despite what we say, few people ever make backups) from having to restore their devices from the cases where the jailbreak works enough to do something to their devices, but just enough to make them need to restore. It won’t matter how much we warn them that the release is not for them, they’ll try it anyway.

Now, I know you guys here in this subreddit care about the community. If something like this happens, the news organizations will simplify things and say jailbreaking is buggy and could brick your device. (This has happened before.) Fewer people will jailbreak as a result, even after the complete version is released. In the worst case, the community will become less vibrant, less people will be inclined to develop tweaks and a vicious cycle can develop. Eventually the Library of Congress will figure that no one is interested in jailbreaking anymore and end that exemption as well.

Honestly, we’re not working on getting every pixel right in some weird Jobsian way; the work is being put into making sure it runs at all on everyone’s computers.

So, there you have it. Finally a respectful explanation as to why there have been delays for the iOS 6 tool. Interested in reading the full Reddit thread, hop on down to the source link below.